John Black is a fictional character on Days of Our Lives, an American soap opera streaming on Peacock. He was played by Drake Hogestyn from January 1986 to January 2009, and since September 2011. John was created by scriptwriters Sheri Anderson, Thom Racina and Leah Laiman as the Pawn in 1985, and introduced by executive producers Betty Corday and Al Rabin. He became one of the series' most popular characters when he was revealed to be the presumed-dead Roman Brady, after plastic surgery and amnesia. Northrop's 1991 return led to Hogestyn's portrayal of Roman being retconned into the separate character of John Black, which establishes the supercouple pairing of John and Marlena due to John's affair with Roman's wife Marlena Evans.

Days of Our Lives is an American television soap opera that aired on the network NBC from 1965 to 2022 and currently streams new episodes on Peacock. The soap is one of the longest-running scripted television programs in the world, airing nearly every weekday since November 8, 1965. A co-production of Corday Productions and Sony Pictures Television, the series was created by husband-and-wife team Ted Corday and Betty Corday. During Days of Our Lives' early years, Irna Phillips served as a story editor for the program and many of the show's earliest storylines were written by William J. Bell, who would depart the series in 1975 to focus full-time on The Young and the Restless, which he created for CBS in 1973. Following the 2007 cancellation of Passions, Days of Our Lives remained the only soap opera airing on NBC. On August 3, 2022, NBCUniversal announced that it would relocate the series exclusively to its Peacock streaming service beginning September 12 after 57 years on the network and leaving NBC as the only Big Three network without a daytime serial.